"What if this great goal of reducing African poverty isn't actually achievable the way the world has been going about it? What if the aid industry has been, in effect, a token gesture, which makes all of us living in the west feel as if we are Doing Something?" Such are the hard questions posed in Bolton's superbly lucid and readable book, which intersperses his careful arguments about charity, government aid, loans and trade with colourful vignettes drawn from his two years' experience as an aid worker in Rwanda (surreal government functions contrasted with the lives of impoverished villagers, omnipresent yellow plastic buckets, and - thought-provoking, this - a near-constant soundtrack of Phil Collins, Bryan Adams and Rick Astley).

To précis the author's views: there is not enough aid, and what there is is spent inefficiently; but African government corruption is not the massive problem it is sometimes made out to be; and each of us is further harming Africans by contributing to absurd western agricultural subsidies (such as our gifting every cow in the EU with €2.50 a day), which prevent African producers from being competitive in the world market. Bono and Bob Geldof deserve "bouquets", but most of the shiny promises about fighting poverty at the 2005 G8 summit weren't new; "it's just that no one had delivered". The author's concluding recommendations are simple: press our governments to keep their promises, give to big charities that know what they're doing, and when we can, buy ethically sourced produce and fairtrade coffee, like this delicious, rather chocolatey Ethiopian Langano I'm drinking now. See? It's easy.

Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?, by Leszek Kolakowski (Allen Lane, £12.99)

Why indeed? Leibniz said the answer was God, that being the only thing that could guarantee a first cause; but the question itself has hardly gone stale, now troubling astrophysicists and the like. Kolakowski's super-elegant, bijou philosophical vade mecum treats 23 such enduring questions through individual philosophers, beginning with Socrates and ending with Husserl. Thus we have Parmenides on "What is real?", Augustine on "What is evil"?, Spinoza on free will, Locke on equality, Hegel on progress, and so on.

At the end of each microessay, Kolakowski points out issues for further reflection, couched with devastating innocence. And he always treats ideas with rigorous sympathy, refreshing their strangeness, although he is not averse to the odd quip: "Schopenhauer even exalts the virtue of chastity (although he himself does not appear to have practised it much)." For these reasons his book is not a mere backward-looking compendium, but a conjuration of the history of philosophy as one great continuing moment of reflection.

The Proms: A New History, edited by Jenny Doctor and David Wright (Thames & Hudson, £24.95)

There was I wondering why exactly they are called the Proms when, at least the times I've been, my fellow prommers and I have not actually been ambulatory but rather standing or sitting in one spot. Thankfully this glossy history has the answer: in the original series of "Promenade Concerts" that began at the Queen's Hall in 1895, the ladies and gents in evening wear were indeed encouraged to wander around and socialise, drifting in and out of the range of the music as they pleased. Glad to have that cleared up. The scholarly detail of programming, logistics, techies and artistes packed into this volume will delight any Proms buff; and the authoritative narration provides a kind of wide-angle record of British musical tastes over the 20th century. There are also many lovely illustrations, including gorgeous colour reproductions of old posters, scores scribbled on by conductors, and a Punch cartoon from 1953 complaining about the TV cameraman cutting around the orchestra too fast. They still do that, don't they?